ABSTRACT
Nanowires and nanoholes are two kinds of typical nanostructures. Commonly, these nanostructures have cross-sectional dimensions that can be tuned from a few nanometers to hundreds of nanometers, with lengths spanning from hundreds of nanometers to several micrometers. Nanowires are known as one-dimensional (1D) nanostructures because they are confined in two dimensions, that is, cross-sectional planes, thus allowing electrons, holes, or photons to propagate freely along the third dimension. In photovoltaic applications, silicon nanowire and nanohole arrays exhibit unique optical and electrical characteristics for building photovoltaic devices with high performance to cost ratios over traditional planar junction bulk silicon structures. Therefore, high-performance silicon nanowire and nanohole array–based photovoltaic devices should have the optimal array periodicity matching the wavelength region in which the photon number is relatively large. The research progress in nanowire and nanohole arrays largely benefits from the advanced simulation methods and the improvement of computers ability.
